Is this a question you have really asked through your business? If not we suggest you do as the answer might surprise you and will help to determine your strategy for how you might get to where you want to be.

It’s a question we invariably ask of both individuals when training and with business leaders when determining what competent services they require. Initially the standard answer tends to be to make sure everyone is safe; but when we explore further this is not always congruent with the wider attitude inside the business. At a recent training session one of the attendees suggested is was to because their business wanted to protect itself from being sued. When this was explored further others tended to agree perhaps that was the real motive for their business as well.

You might think well if we achieve this target then of course we will be making sure our employees won’t be harmed; unfortunately this is often not the case. Trying to protect the business with policies, procedures, safe systems of working and forms to be filled in does not stop bad things happening by themselves.

What a business needs is to develop an attitude to health and safety that challenges existing thinking, that ensures staff understand the why and how to keep them safe and healthy and this requires much more effort than writing policies to protect a business.

We believe it’s important to embrace the thinking that everyone has the right to go home in the same fit and healthy condition they start the day in. In our experience most risks can be effectively managed if the necessary effort is put into identifying them in the first place. It is not the easy approach but long term it will pay significant dividends in time effort and money saved.